From RH:

Scott Simon is the son of comedian Ernest Simon and Pat Simon, the most beautiful woman in Chicago. He is the host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He has covered ten wars, from El Salvador to Iraq, and has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody and the Emmy. His memoir, Home and Away, rose to the top of the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller list. His second book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, was named Barnes & Noble's Sports Book of the Year. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughters.

Scott Simon was born .... The son of comedian Ernie Simon and actress Patricia Lyons, Simon grew up in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Cleveland, and Washington, DC. He attended the University of Chicago and McGill University, and he has received a number of honorary degrees.

Scott Simon joined NPR in 1977 as chief of its Chicago bureau and is currently the Host of Weekend Edition Saturday. He has reported from all 50 states, covered presidential campaigns and ten wars, and reported from Central America, Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. He has received numerous honors for his reporting.

Simon has written for The New York Times' Book Review and Opinion sections, the Wall Street Journal opinion page, The Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet Magazine.

He has been married to Caroline Richard since the summer of 2002.

Taken From NPR--Let’s edit it:

From Ground Zero in New York to ground zero in Kabul, to police stations, subway platforms, and darkened theaters, NPR's Peabody-Award-winning correspondent Scott Simon brings a well-traveled perspective to his role as host of Weekend Edition Saturday.

Simon joined NPR in 1977 as chief of its Chicago bureau. Since then, he has reported from all 50 states, covered presidential campaigns and eight wars, and reported from Central America, Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. In 2002, Simon took leave of his usual post at Weekend Edition Saturday to cover the war in Afghanistan for NPR. He has also reported from Central America on the continuing wars in that region; from Cuba on the nation's resistance to change; from Ethiopia on the country's famine and prolonged civil war; from the Middle East during the Gulf War; and from the siege of Sarajevo and the destruction of Kosovo.

Simon has received numerous honors for his reporting. His work was part of the Overseas Press Club and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards NPR earned for coverage of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. He was part of the NPR news teams that won prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for covering the war in Kosovo as well as the Gulf War. In 1989, he won a George Foster Peabody Award for his weekly radio essays. The award commended him for his sensitivity and literary style in coverage of events including the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador and the San Francisco earthquake. Simon also accepted the Presidential End Hunger Award for his series of reports on the 1987-1988 Ethiopian civil war and drought. He received a 1986 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his coverage of racism in a South Philadelphia neighborhood, and a 1986 Silver Cindy for a report on conditions at the Immigration and Naturalization Service's detention center in Harlingen, Texas.

Simon received a Major Armstrong Award in 1979 for his coverage of the American Nazi Party rally in Chicago, and a Unity Award in Media in 1978 for his political reporting on All Things Considered. He also won a 1982 Emmy for the public television documentary The Patterson Project, which examined the effects of President Reagan's budget cuts on the lives of 12 New Jersey residents.

Simon has been a frequent guest host of the CBS television program Nightwatch and CNBC's TalkBack Live. In addition to hosting Weekend Edition Saturday, Simon has appeared as an essayist and commentator on NBC's Weekend Today and NOW with Bill Moyers. He has hosted many public television programs, including “Voices of Vision,” “Life on the Internet,” “State of Mind,” “American Pie,” “Search for Common Ground,” and specials on privacy in America and democracy in the Middle East. He also narrated the documentary film "Lincoln of Illinois" for PBS. Simon participated in the Grammy Award-nominated 50th anniversary remake of The War of the Worlds (co-starring Jason Robards), and hosted public television's coverage of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Simon has hosted the BBC series Eyewitness, which was seen in the United States on the Discovery Channel, and a BBC special on the White House press corps. Simon was also a featured co-anchor of PBS's millennium special broadcast in 2000.

Simon has written for The New York Times' Book Review and Opinion sections, the Wall Street Journal opinion page, The Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet Magazine.

The son of comedian Ernie Simon and actress Patricia Lyons, Simon grew up in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Cleveland, and Washington, DC. He attended the University of Chicago and McGill University, and he has received a number of honorary degrees.

Simon's book Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan was published in the spring of 2000 by Hyperion, a division of Disney. It topped the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller list for several weeks, and was cited as one of the best books of the year in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and several other publications. His second book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, kicked off the prestigious Wiley Turning Points series in September of 2002. Simon’s first novel, Pretty Birds, about female teenaged snipers in Sarajevo, was released in May 2005 to very strong, positive reviews.

In the summer of 2000, Simon married Caroline Richard. His hobbies are Mexican cooking, ballet, book collecting, and living and dying for the Chicago Cubs (and now the French national soccer team).

INTERVIEWS

           Bob Edwards, Morning Edition

REVIEWS

Publishers Weekly

“As the cliche goes, if Jackie Robinson hadn't existed, someone would have had to invent him. In fact, much of this mini-bio by National Public Radio's Simon serves to dismiss the oft-spoken argument that much of Robinson's legend (and that of his patron, the Brooklyn Dodgers' general manager Branch Rickey) can be attributed to the mythmakers who have made a career for themselves deifying the man who integrated baseball's National League in 1947. Simon revises the revisionists not by analyzing the rose-tinted image many have painted of Robinson and Rickey, but rather by allowing each man to be human and decidedly flawed. Not allowing his shortcomings (a brash temper, a noted rebelliousness and a not insignificant amount of baseball snobbery) to define his performance as a player was Robinson's greatest success, and Simon (Home and Away) illustrates that point ably. He doesn't tell readers anything they don't know about Robinson, Rickey, the Dodgers, Brooklyn and the state of race relations in the 1940s, but he does a slightly more thorough job than most of illuminating Jackie's one and only year playing for Brooklyn's farm club in Montreal, the place where Rickey's "noble experiment" actually began. This episode is often overlooked by everyone except Montrealers, who take no small amount of pride in their role as pioneers. (Simon notes that Robinson's earlier tryout with the Boston Red Sox was for naught, quite possibly because that team's farm team played in conservative, segregated Kentucky rather than liberal, cosmopolitan Montreal.) While no new ground is covered, Simon's account of Robinson, Rickey and the integration of baseball is as thorough and accessible as the reader is likely to find.”

Library Journal

What does Simon, host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, bring to the Robinson legacy? The standard was set by Jules Tygiel's 1997 update of his great 1983 book, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. For the casual reader who may not wish to slog through Tygiel's 432 pages of history and sociology, Simon's 176 pages may be just the ticket. This more modest book-part of Wiley's new "Turning Points" series focusing on "defining" historical events-deals primarily with Robinson's life, from his service in the army during World War II through his first couple of seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In writing about Robinson, Simon also tells the story of segregated America. To a younger generation not familiar with Jim Crow society, the world rendered so vividly through Simon's writing will seem like another planet. The reader has to be reminded that this iniquitous period of American history was not all that long ago. Simon's book does not reveal anything new about Robinson, but for those not completely familiar with his story, this is an excellent place to start. Readers familiar with the story can still enjoy a wordsmith's craft. It is much the same quality as his work on National Public Radio. Enthusiastically recommended.

The Washington Post

“Koufax's rookie year was the season when Jackie Robinson's Dodgers finally won the World Series. In a new book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, National Public Radio host Scott Simon re-examines the Robinson story. There is no need for a new chronicle of Robinson's arrival in major league baseball, Simon acknowledges near the end of this slim volume. Yes, but perhaps no one has ever told the tale so well as he does in this extended essay. With an ear for the incisive phrase, Simon recaptures the drama of Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey searching for the right African-American ballplayer to break the color line. In his first meeting with Robinson, Rickey thundered at the former four-sport star at UCLA, telling him what kind of man he wanted for the task: "I'm looking for a ballplayer with the guts not to fight back." "I have another cheek," Robinson assured Rickey, and the deal was set.

Two years later, in 1947, Robinson first appeared in the big leagues. He endured the taunts, catcalls, beanballs, brushback pitches, high spikes and low blows and, finally, the burden of trying to play ball while worrying that history could turn - or be turned back - by whether he could hit a curve. Robinson proved he could hit a curve and anything else a pitcher could throw at him, helping the Dodgers to the pennant in his rookie year, winning the Most Valuable Player award in 1949 and, most important, opening the door to thousands of other African-American major leaguers.” (The Washington Post Book World, Sunday, October 13, 2002)

Chicago Tribune

"an extraordinary little book in an extraordinary new series intended to capture extraordinary moments in history." (Chicago Tribune, September 29, 2002)

The New York Times Book Review

"Simon... is at his best when giving the reader the texture of Robinson's story..." (The New York Times Book Review)

SKY

"delights audiences with his wit, inquisitiveness and humanity..." (SKY, October 2002)

Stealing home and hearts

“Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”

Buddy Johnson